Welcome to our Blog!

Welcome friends and family to Chase and Merrill's blog. We are looking forward to using this an outlet for us as well as way to keep in touch with all of you. You might think the name is a bit peculiar and I would have to agree with you. Chase named it, "A Slice of life with extra Chile" because soon we will be moving to Chile and I can almost guarantee that most of the posts will involve our adventures in Chile. We hope you all will enjoy this blog about our lives abroad!

For those of you who do not know yet Chase and I will be moving to Chile August 12, 2009. Our current plan, which however always seems to be changing, is to rent a furnished apartment for a month till we get our bearings in a new country where we do not speak the language. You might be wondering what in the world will two non fluent Texans will be doing in Chile? We will be teaching English, or at least that is the plan as of right now. As you can tell we are tying to be very flexible and open to whatever God has for us.

In fact in the last couple of days some amazing things have happened. Last week Chase and I met with the Head Pastor of outreach and Ministry from 1st Pres in Houston who has spent some time in South America. He gave us some great advice and promised to try to help find a church to get involved with down in Santiago. Sunday we went to dinner at my grandparents house not knowing she had invited the neighbors to dinner as well. It turned out to be a great Jeremy, the neighbor, informed us that his parents had actually lived in Santiago for 6 years. Jeremy provided some invaluable information and promised to see if his father had any contacts still in Chile. Then yesterday, being Wednesday I got an email from one of my mom's friends who has a friend that actually married a Chilean and is currently living in Santiago. Lastly this morning Chase went to breakfast with a friend, who is a leader for Young Life at Lamar High school. One of the guys that he has been ministering to is an exchange student from Chile. We will hopefully get to meet him in the next few weeks!

Never in my life has God made something so obvious, Chase and I are supposed to go to Santiago.

A quick note on how we even decided to move to Chile and why. Ever since I was a little girl I would hear stories of my dad traveling around the world and especially about his year abroad in Dubai (yes my father is always at least 10 to 20 years before his time) this was way before Dubai became what it is today. Anyways I always thought that I would take a year off from College like he did, but when the time came while I was at Baylor I did not want to leave for year and miss something. Not only that but by then I had met Chase and did not really want to leave him for a year. Luckily I married a man who love to travel and seeks adventures so a year ago when I mentioned wanting to move always for year he said he would think about it. About that time we met a couple who had spent a year teaching in Thailand, thus the idea of teaching abroad for a year was born. We originally considered going to Asia but after we sat down and considered exactly what we wanted out of the year we soon realized that South America would be much better especially because the dollar is strong and we would learn to speak Spanish something we both think will be useful. From there we narrowed it down to Argentina and Chile and through research and prayer decided on Chile!